Films and how I see them.Comments and correspondence: jorge.mourinha@gmail.com

Tuesday, September 06, 2011

ZEMLYA

USSR
1930
87 minutes

Ukrainian director Alexander Dovzhenko's silent-era paean to agricultural
progress has gone down in film history as one of the all-time great
movies – and no wonder. Its by now timeworn but then positively
modern imagery of rolling wheat plains under wide open skies and
backlighted square-jawed brave peasants, or its skill in the
assemblage of said imagery to make a point both simultaneously
narrative and ideological would be enough, but there's also an
unusually nuanced approach to politics in it – which is the reason
Earth
most
often confused the Party whose exploits the film supposedly sings.

At heart a propaganda piece in favor of the collective exploitation
of the Ukrainian agricultural fields, under the guise of a class
drama pitting the poor tenant farmers against the land-owning
“kulaks”, the film takes its sweet time in getting
there. Mr. Dovzhenko, directing, writing and editing, much prefers to
place nature and its rhythms at the forefront, treating its
characters as mere archetypes who draw their wisdom and reason from
those ancestral habits marked by the roll of the seasons. Despite the
final message of the “singing tomorrows”, with the entire
village's youngsters singing at slain tenant Vassili's funeral, or
the rousing scenes of the newly-acquired village machines toiling the
fields, it's very clear that progress is there to heighten and serve
nature, a new way of making sure its rhythms remain eternal.